Studio 666 (2022) - Movie Review

Medicine At Midnight is a weird-ass album. I love the hell out of the Foo Fighters (Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is one of my favourite albums from any band), but hearing them go into full-on DFA-style dance-rock was quite jarring. It’s like a midway point between a standard late-period Foos album and a Bee Gees cover album, which the Foos also released just a few months later under the name ‘Dee Gees’ (it’s called Hail Satin, and it’s surprisingly good; Dave can hit those high notes). For a former post-grunge band rubbing up against disco, it’s certainly not as embarrassing as Nickleback’s She Keeps Me Up, and even in the larger spectrum of aging post-grunge, it’s a hell of a lot better than whatever the fuck Aaron Lewis is doing nowadays, but it’s still very odd. To paraphrase a YouTube comment under their cover of You Should Be Dancing, it shows the Foos entering the “because we fucking can” phase of their career.

I bring all this up because, even with all that in my head beforehand, the most interesting aspect of Medicine At Midnight isn’t on the album itself. Rather, it’s to do with where Grohl and company recorded the thing. They shacked up in a 1940s mansion in Encino, Los Angeles, where, according to Grohl, weird shit kept happened. Like, ‘this house might be possessed’ kind of weird shit. They had to sign an NDA with the house’s owner, so they’re unable to get into their own supposed filmed evidence of this stuff, but basically, the Foos’ softest record to date was recorded under some pretty metal circumstances.

And from that background, the spores for this film came forth, with a script based on Dave Grohl’s experiences and the band itself starring as fictionalised versions of themselves. Hell, the main shooting location is the Encino property this all originally took place in. I had next to no expectations going into this, but out of respect for both the Spheres and Dave Grohl himself as the nicest guy in rock, I was definitely curious to see what kind of production could spring out of such an idea. The end result of it all, however, is confusingly muddled.

Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck (2015) - Movie Review

In 1991, out of the haze of hair metal and obnoxiously overblown metrosexuality, Nirvana broke onto the pop music scene and pretty much razed the entire landscape around them. From there, they rebuilt from the ashes to create what would end up being the definitive musical attitude for the 90’s. All of a sudden, “alternative” artists broke out into the mainstream, bringing with them a sense of raw vulnerability and unflinching emotion the likes of which hadn’t been seen before. This would later give birth to the rarely-if-ever-good nu-metal movement and, God help us, Nickelback, but for the time being, Kurt Cobain and company were at the level of new rock gods. But then, typical rock star backstage drama took place, unfortunately ending in Kurt’s suicide in 1994. We’ve seen plenty of documentaries emerge about the artist, as well as a film loosely based on his story by Gus Van Sant in the form of Last Days, but this should prove to be something different. Not only is it co-produced by HBO, the only TV channel that carries consistent quality when it comes to feature-length productions, but this is also the first doco to be made with the support of the Cobain family. Will that extra access lead to something special?